Steve Nash’s Playoff Slump

Steve Nash has struggled to maintain his regular-season form in the playoffs.

Steve Nash is the only winner of the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award never to have made the finals — and he’ll have to lead his Phoenix Suns to four wins in five games against the Lakers to change that this season. How much is his conspicuous absence from the NBA championship series his fault?

To find out, I examined how much his performance has fallen off during the playoffs. I used a statistic from Basketball Reference called win shares per 48 minutes (WS/48). Win shares is an estimate of how many wins a player has contributed to his team, based on box-score stats that track offensive and defensive impact.

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